A wireless multifunctional monitoring system of tower body running state based on MEMS acceleration sensor

This paper proposes a design of wireless monitoring system of tower body running state such as tilt angle, temperature, humidity, wind speed, etc. This design adopts the structural health monitoring (SHM) techniques to monitor the state of tower, and can be applied to both the power transmission tower and the communication tower. Although the SHM has been widely applied to civil engineering and building structures subjected to various loadings, there are few applications in the running state monitoring for the power transmission and communication towers. In this study, micro-electro-mechanical system (MEMS)-based acceleration sensor is used, in which a method is employed for calculating the tilt based on the difference between the acceleration due to combination of gravity and other stresses and the acceleration due to gravity alone. The wireless system uses wireless sensor nodes to transmit the tower running state data to the monitoring server. The wireless sensor node system consists of a short-distance wireless transmission network (ZigBee 2.4GHz) and a remote telecommunication network (Global System for Mobile Communication - GSM). By so doing, the important problem about the communication distance limitation is resolved. The performance of the monitoring system is evaluated through several experiments. The experimental results indicate the wireless monitoring system can accurately monitor the tower body running state in real time.